Three years ago, actor/director George Takei and his husband, Brad Altman, were in the audience for the Broadway production of "In the Heights" when the character of a father, unable to pay for his daughter's college education, sang the heartwrenching song
"Inutil"
("Useless" in Spanish).

For Takei, best known for his role as helmsman Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek," the song transported him back 67 years, when his own father silently led their L.A. family into a Japanese internment camp in Rohwer, Ark. The Takeis were among 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry who were forced into 10 barren, barbed-wire-ringed camps in the months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

"The song made me break down. It reminded me of my father in the camps. I was 6 years old at the time," Takei recalled recently. "I remember waking up in the middle of the night and hearing my parents talking, over a kerosene lamp. My mother would tell me to go back to sleep. I feel things very deeply, and when I heard that song, I started bawling."

Sitting a few seats away were composer Jay Kuo and Broadway producer/writer Lorenzo Thione, whom Takei and Altman had met just the night before at another show. At intermission, Kuo asked Takei why he was so grief-stricken, and Takei shared the story of his family's internment at Rohwer, and later Tule Lake, a small camp on the California/Oregon border. From that seed, "Allegiance ---- A New American Musical" was born.

The world premiere musical opens at the Old Globe Theatre in previews Sept. 8, with an opening night scheduled for Sept. 19.

The musical memory tale is the story of a fictional Japanese-American farm family from Salinas who are forced into an internment camp and torn apart by divided loyalties to their country, their heritage, their own consciences and to each other. Takei stars in the musical as Sam Kimura, a World War II veteran in his 70s and a former internee. Broadway star Telly Leung ("Flower Drum Song," "Godspell," "Glee") plays the teenage Sam, and Tony winner Lea Salonga ("Miss Saigon," "Les Miserables") plays Sam's sister, Kei.

Now 75, Takei said he sees "Allegiance" as his "legacy project" ---- one of the accomplishments in his life he'd most like to be remembered for.

"It is my mission in life to raise awareness on the Japanese internment and to see it dramatized in 'Allegiance.' And with Lea and Telly's glorious voices, I can't tell you how thrilling and gratifying this experience has been for me," Takei said during a rehearsal break at the Old Globe last month. "The issues this family encounters in the story are still so alive. If we don't examine the chapters of our history where we faltered, it's doomed to happen again. We have to be active participants in a democracy. If we aren't, we deserve the democracy we get."

The musical had a workshop in New York last year at which Kuo and Thione realized more work was needed on the story, so bookwriter Marc Acito (whose "A Room With a View" premiered at the Globe last winter) was brought in to revamp the script. If all goes well at the Globe, the creators say they hope to take the show to New York next spring.

Salonga, who has been with the project since the beginning, said the Kimura family story has come a long way with Acito's help.

"It's flowing a lot more naturally now," she said. "The characters' emotional arcs are tracking so much better. Everything makes sense. I think it's in really good shape."

The musical begins just months after the 9/11 attacks in December 2001, when the elderly Sam ---- a Purple Heart-decorated U.S. World War II veteran who still limps from a shrapnel wound ---- is being honored by the Japanese American Citizens League on the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Sam's memories swirl and the story steps back in time to the Kimuras' thriving artichoke farm in 1941, where the young Sam has been elected class president of his high school. He tells his sister, Kei, he wants to attend UCLA (Takei's actual alma mater) and someday run for president of the United States. But that is not to be.

The Pearl Harbor attack would lead to a national hysteria, and within three months President Franklin D. Roosevelt would sign Executive Order 9066, which forced most Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast into remote, hastily assembled camps for the duration of the war. When the internees emerged three years later, most were destitute. Takei said his family lost everything, and when they returned to his native L.A., they lived in poverty on Skid Row.

Because he was so young at the time, Takei recalls his camp years as a great adventure. He was too young to realize how desperate the situation was for his parents.

"I have wonderful memories from the camp because I experienced it from the perspective of a child," he said. "I remember the barbed wire and the machine guns pointed at me. I remember the searchlights at night, but they made running to the latrine easier. I thought they were lighting my way. It was fun."

It was only when he was a teenager at L.A. High School that the full weight of the experience dawned on Takei. "I couldn't reconcile that reality with my understanding of what had happened in my childhood."

In "Allegiance," the Kimura family is torn apart, not only by their harsh experiences in the camp, but by their divided loyalty to the country that has imprisoned them. This reflects the split that occurred in the Japanese-American community in the 1940s. In 1943, the War Relocation Authority required all American-born Japanese over age 17 to fill out a loyalty questionnaire to determine whether they were loyal to the U.S. or the Japanese emperor. One survey question asked whether the signers would be willing to serve combat duty in the U.S. armed forces, and another asked whether they would swear "unqualified allegiance" to the U.S. and not to the Japanese emperor.

Many Japanese-Americans, eager to show their loyalty, answered yes to both questions, and those young men (like the fictional Sam Kimura) were recruited into the U.S. Army's 442nd Regiment, which would end the war as the Army's most decorated unit. But others ---- angry at their imprisonment and fearful of signing the confusingly worded document ---- refused to agree to those questions, and became known as "No Nos."

Takei said he is proud that his parents were "No Nos," but he thinks there were heroes on both sides.

"My heroes are those men who answered 'yes' to outrageous questions and went to fight and perished on those bloody battlefields," Takei said. "I think the men were equally heroic who said, 'I will go to war as an American but not an internee,' and they were tried for draft evasion.'"

Only one character in the musical is a real person, the still-controversial Mike Masaoka. Before and during the war, the Fresno-born Masaoka collaborated with the U.S. government as the national secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League. During the war, he advised the administration on how to get internees to cooperate, and how to segregate disloyal prisoners, and he helped form the 442nd regiment. After the war, Masaoka spent many years lobbying for the rights of Japanese-Americans.

To this day, the Japanese community remains divided on Masaoka, who died in 1991. Takei said he was taken aback by the fury of some elderly Japanese-Americans because Masaoka is a character in "Allegiance."

"It's going to be controversial," Takei said. "There's a fracture in the community about him. There is still fierce division between the resisters and the JACL. They say, 'The JACL did this to us,' and the resisters were vilified. Their whole lives were changed and they were ostracized. But you can't stifle what is historically true. Some people still see him as a hero, even in the face of the facts."

Bookwriter Acito is one of the few non-Asians involved in the Globe production, and during a recent rehearsal, he would frequently propose a line change, then turn quickly to Kuo to ask him whether the words were authentically Asian. Kuo and Leung are Chinese, Salonga is a citizen of the Philippines, director Stafford Arima ("Ace," "Altar Boyz") is half Japanese, half Chinese, and most of the cast is Asian. (Several non-Asian local actors are in the 21-member cast, including Escondido native Allie Trimm, Geno Carr, Kurt Norby, Brandon Joel Maier and Jill Townsend).

"Allegiance" would likely meet the approval of New York's Asian American Performers Action Coalition, which led a media campaign this past summer against "The Nightingale" workshop at La Jolla Playhouse. That musical, by "Spring Awakening" co-creators Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, was targeted by the coalition because the story was inspired by a Chinese fairytale and set in China, but only a few Asian actors were in the cast.

"The Asian community has outstanding artists but the opportunities for them are very limited," Takei said. "I believe in casting with the most talented people, but if you don't deal with the attitudes that created the stereotypes, you'll never change them."

Salonga was a firsthand witness to one of the most controversial casting decisions in Broadway history, when Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce was cast (in yellow face paint) as The Engineer, the enterprising Vietnamese businessman, in the 1991 Broadway premiere of "Miss Saigon."

Salonga said colorblind casting has improved over the past two decades. She was cast as both Eponine and Fantine, 19th-century Englishwomen in "Les Miserables," and she provided the voice for two animated Disney princesses, Jasmine and Mulan. But she said that race should be an element considered in the casting process to provide context for the audience and the other actors onstage.

Interest in "Allegiance" has been high, in part because Takei has taken every opportunity to promote the musical among the more than 2.8 million people who follow his mostly amusing daily posts on Facebook. Takei said he started the Facebook page specifically to teach the public about the Japanese internment.

"It started with nerds, geeks and sci-fi fans, and it has grown," Takei said. "We give people a few giggles and slip in a little on the Japanese internment. It piques their curiosity, and it educates."

Although educating the public is Takei's primary goal with "Allegiance," there's also a very personal reason he wants to see this project through. It will allow him to show respect for, and make amends to, his father ---- Takekuma "Norman" Takei, who died in 1979.

"The regrets Sam has in this show are parallel to what I had as an idealistic teenager," Takei said. "There is no one more arrogant than an idealistic teenager, and during the civil rights era, I said, 'Daddy, you led us like sheep to slaughter when you marched us into that camp.' ... I never apologized to him, and that haunts me. I was this arrogant kid, and here was this man who suffered so much. I have shed so many tears over that."